The Bronx's Angriest White Man

"You can call me a racist and end it right here, or you can hear me out. Find out what got me to feel this way." I was sitting in a Bronx diner with a man who told me to call him Sam Lang. He'd just finished an angry monologue on his loathing of blacks and I had taken issue with his crazy views. But I decided to hear him out. Lang had read an article I did in

October, "Blood In, Blood Out," on the street gang the Bloods, and had some problems with it. He got in touch with me and we agreed to meet and have a talk.

Lang is 40 and was born and raised in the Bronx. With a tough-guy edge to his voice, he asked what Bronx neighborhood I'd grown up in. It wasn't a question. He wanted to check my pedigree.

"Off Fordham Rd.," I said.

That seemed to meet with his approval. Lang told me he grew up on University Ave. "Look, I came up in the 70s, and you remember what the Bronx was like then. Whites were a minority even back then," he noted. "But it was different then. When I went to school I was one of the few white kids. But I got treated all right. I got challenged, but I can handle myself in a fight so I was left alone. Even made a few black friends. Played a lot of ball with them. I never felt fully accepted but I didn't feel like a total outsider. We were all right. Then something happened."

What happened was that a black heroin addict jumped Lang's mother in their building lobby.

"My mother was no idiot," says Lang. "She would have given up her purse. In fact, she did give up her purse, but that scumbag still went ahead and cracked her melon in with a lead pipe. Imagine hitting a 55-year-old woman in the head with a pipe. What kind of animal does that?"

Lang's mother was in a coma for a month. She finally recovered, and the family moved to a predominantly Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx.

"Now, I didn't hate blacks because one faggot almost killed my mother," Lang says. "It took more than that."

In his late teen years Lang fell in with a bad crew of tough-ass white guys and started doing some crime of his own. When I told him that made him a punk, he put his coffee down and stared into my eyes.

"I ain't saying I'm a saint, but I never hurt anyone that couldn't defend themselves, and I never stole from anyone who was honest."

What Lang and his crew got into was ripping off drug dealers. I gave it to him that that took some balls.

"You bet it did. Them boys were armed and dangerous. But," he adds, "they were greedy, and greed always makes you blind to what is coming. Plus, they see a white guy coming and all they see is some white pussy boy with money who is going to overpay them for their shit-ass drugs. When you pull out your hand and you have a silver handgun in it instead of green money, they almost shit themselves. I got people out there who, if they remembered me, I would be a dead man. But most of them are dead now. At least I hope they are."

As I pushed on, I found out that Lang was not totally honest about his crime career. Along with robbing drug dealers he did a few stickups?mainly of gas stations and convenience stores. It was on a gas station heist that his crime career, for a while, was ended by a Bronx cop.

"Since it was my first offense?" Lang paused to laugh at that?"the judge gave me a break. A big break. He gave me a choice of five years in jail or joining the military. I joined the Army."

His career in the armed forces was less than stellar. It also led to his hatred of blacks.

"There was no war going on then, but we had a race war at the base I was stationed at," Lang tells me. "See, that's how it started. Most of the sergeants and over half the base were black, and they hated the white man. I mean they really hated white people. Not just some racist shitkicker from Alabama. Anyone with white skin was their enemy. And whatever power they had they used against whites. Some dirty, ugly equipment needed cleaning and a black staff sergeant was about, you could bet a white guy would be doing that shit job while his black friends leaned on mops laughing at the cracker.

"And the fights," he remembers. "Man, they would press me, but I grew up around them in the Bronx and I wasn't going to take shit from them. I kicked ass and got my ass kicked. My whole time in the Army I had to listen to them say, 'You crackers this...' and 'You honkies that...' It was after that they became?and remain?niggers to me."

Lang got out of the military and went right back to crime. He got busted for a stickup and got a five-year bid upstate.

"I did every year of that bid, and that's why I hated your article. Those fuckin' Bloods are evil. They say the white man is the devil. I have seen more black devils in my time than whites.

"What they don't do to whites in prison," Lang says. "You come in a white fish and don't know what's up, and them freaks will strip you bare-assed and have a Playboy centerfold taped to your back and fuck you in the ass. The niggers run everything in prison and the guards give in to them because they outnumber everyone. They don't want any trouble from the brothers so they just give in to them. They do some dirty things to whites in prison."

I asked Lang if he'd had problems in jail.

"I had my fights. But I teamed up with one of the few white crews and we cut out our own corner of the jail. It wasn't much, but we were crazy enough and had enough balls to keep the niggers away from us."

Lang's been free for four years now and claims he has remained crime-free. He has a job in a factory in the Bronx and rents a room nearby.

"Look, I don't run down anyone else. I hang out with Dominicans. DDP [a Dominican gang called Dominicans Don't Play] did me right in the joint. They're just like the Irish. Mean to their women, and they drink a lot, but they will not hate you just for the color of your skin like the blacks do. I got me a Cambodian girlfriend. You know, the Bronx is full of Mexicans, Vietnamese and Cambodians now. Good people, hard workers. And they hate niggers too."

If he dislikes blacks so much, I wondered, why didn't he just move out of the Bronx?

"What kind of question is that?" he shot back. "Why do I have to move? One, I'm too poor to move. And secondly, I like the Bronx. My job is here. I got a nice room. Things are cheap here. And, hey, there are less blacks around now then when I was a kid."

Lang got up and left me to pay the check. As he reached the door he turned and said, "You ain't gonna publish what I just said. Too?how you say now?politically incorrect. But if you think I'm full of shit go visit some poor white bastard in jail and see what he says."

He comes back to the table and in a low voice says, "You remember that thing that happened out in Texas? The thing where the three white guys dragged a nigger with a car and killed him."

I told him that would be the Jasper, TX, killing of James Byrd.

"Yeah, that one. That was horrible what they did to that man, but did you know that those three white guys had just gotten out of jail and were treated like shit in the joint? Once they got out they swore to get revenge on the black man. I guess they did."

I told Lang that no one?no matter what?deserves to be dragged to their death.

"Maybe," he says. "But just remember this about your so-called black friends: they hate your white ass too."